Tories attack BBC for questioning farming lobby’s inheritance tax claims – UK politics live | Politics

Frontline police are losing the confidence to use their full powers after lengthy prosecutions like the trial of the officer who shot Chris Kaba, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary has said.

Speaking at a policing conference in Westminster, Philp said that if the government did not act, the opposition would present plans to parliament itself. He said:

Many officers I’ve spoken to … feel their reasonable use of force or other police powers is treated disproportionately or unreasonably after the event, in a way that doesn’t reflect and recognise the pressures of dealing with an incident or the split second decision making, which is inevitably required.

Some incidents go into lengthy and bureaucratic Independent Office for Police Conduct investigations, or even prosecutions, where common sense says that is not appropriate.

Martyn Blake was cleared of the murder of Kaba in three hours by a jury at the Old Bailey last month. Philp also cited the case of Pc Paul Fisher, who was cleared of dangerous driving after crashing on the way to a terrorist incident in Streatham, south east London. Philp said:

We need police officers on the front line to be prepared to take the lawful action necessary to protect themselves and the public.

We need them to drive quickly to the scene of an attack by terrorists and save lives.

We need stop and search to be used to take knives off our streets, we need force to be used where necessary to detain suspects, and I’m concerned that officers are losing the confidence to exercise those powers as required to keep the public safe.

Philp said he wanted the government to allow officers to use the fact they were acting in line with their training as a defence to a criminal or misconduct charge. And he said he wanted this in legislation.

If the government doesn’t make those changes, then at the next opportunity, as the shadow home secretary, I will seek to introduce those measures as an amendment to the next piece of legislation that goes through parliament.

Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, has just started giving evidence to the Commons housing committee. The hearing is about the government’s plan to build 1.5m new homes over the course of this parliament.

Asked if this was deliverable, Pennycook said it was not just deliverable, but also “essential”.

He said it was “an incredibly stretching target”. But he said anything less would have been an inadequate response to the housing crisis. A generation of people were being priced out of home ownership, he said. He went on:

We’ve got millions of low to middle income households forced into insecure, unaffordable and far too often substandard private rented housing. We have 1.3 million people languishing on social housing waiting lists, and to our utter shame as a nation, more than 150,000 homeless children right now living in temporary accommodation. That is the price we’ve paid for not being serious about house building rates.

But Pennycook also said that building 1.5m homes over five years would be “more difficult” than Labour expected when it set the target in opposition. He said the OBR was predicting a fall in housing supply.

Good morning. Keir Starmer is travelling back from the G20 summit in Brazil, but he won’t be in the Commons in time for PMQs, and so Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, will be taking questions on his behalf. In line with recent practice, Kemi Badenoch, the new Conservative leader, won’t go up against a deputy, and she will miss the session too. The Tories don’t have a deputy leader, but Badenoch is getting Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, to stand in for her.

The PM might not be answering, but that does not mean the questions get any easier. The situation in Ukraine is looking increasingly perilous, inflation is going up, and figures out yesterday have reignited the row about the government’s decision to cut the winter fuel payment. But the Conservatives may also want to ask about farmers, and the plan to extend inheritance tax to some farms. Traditonally the Tories have liked to think of themselves as a pro-countryside, pro-farming party, and they will have been reassured by the fact that, when they lined up alongside farmers at yesterday’s rally, they did not just have Jeremy Clarkson with them; the Liberal Democrats, the Green party, Greenpeace and even Just Stop Oil were on the farmers’ side too.

Now the Tories have combined backing the NFU with another deep-seated rightwing obsession – attacking the BBC. In comments that have provided the Daily Telegraph with its splash, Stuart Andrew, the shadow culture secretary, has attacked the BBC for producing a factcheck analysis saying that some of the claims made by the pro-farming lobby about the impact of the inheritance tax change are exaggerated. He said:

The job of BBC Verify is to do exactly that but they’ve failed on their own terms.

The government is refusing to say how many family farms are subject to their tax raid, only offering partial and out of date statistics which fail to account for the full scale of their reforms.

The taxpayers pay for the BBC to be independent and free from bias, not for them to regurgitate Labour lines.

This matter should be immediately looked into and corrected.

The Telegraph story also makes much of Jeremy Clarkson, the TV celebrity and farmer, accusing the BBC of bias because a BBC reporter had the temerity to ask him at yesterday’s rally about the fact that he bought a farm at least in part to dodge inheritance tax – something that he has been happy to boast about in the past.

Andrew’s broadside against the BBC seems to have been inspired by this BBC Verify article and this video summary by Ben Chu, a BBC Verify correspondent, in which he said that claims from the Country Land and Business Association that 70,000 farms would be affected by the change was “almost certainly an overestimate”. Chu had sound grounds for saying this, for the reasons set out in a Treasury letter to the Commons Treasury committee, and the BBC is standing by its story. As it should; most reasonable commentators would agree these reports were fair, not biased. But the row illustrates how hard it can be for a governing party to win an argument when attacking media institutions trying to report impartially becomes part of the opposition’s modus operandi.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, gives a speech to the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s conference.

9.30am: Lord Darzi, the leading surgeon and former health minister, gives evidence to the Commons health committee about the report he wrote for the government on the state of the NHS.

10am: Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, gives evidence to the Commons housing committee about the government’s housebuilding plans.

Noon: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM, faces Alex Burghart, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, at PMQs.

3.20pm: Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, gives evidence to the Commons women and equalities committee about non-consensual intimate image abuse.

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